During development, HP referred to the GS1280 as the Marvel, and PSC’s
twin Marvels are among the first to roll out of HP production. Both house 128
of the newest generation of the powerful Alpha processor, the EV7. Both provide
512 gigabytes of shared memory — each soon to be configured as two
256-gigabyte, 64-processor units.

What's in a Name?: Meet Jonas & Rachel
Since Mario, the CRAY C90, from the early 1990s, PSC
tradition has been to name its systems, and the newly arrived
Marvels presented an opportunity. This time PSC turned from
sports to science. The twin Marvels are Rachel and Jonas, for
Rachel Carson, the southwest Pennsylvania native who
jump-started modern environmentalism with her 1962 book
Silent Spring, and Jonas Salk, whose polio vaccine, developed
at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, in 1955
halted the spread of this crippling disease.

The only difference between these capable Marvel twins is that one of them,
dubbed Jonas, is dedicated to NIH biomedical research, while the other, Rachel,
supports NSF science and engineering. Together, they complement LeMieux with
new capabilities for scientists and engineers nationwide.

Along with a “shared memory” architecture, both new systems have
exceptional “memory bandwidth” — the speed at which data
transfers between hardware memory and the processor. Benchmark tests have
demonstrated that the GS1280 memory bandwidth is five to ten times greater than
comparable systems.

“Such a shared memory, high-performance system is not now
available to biomedical researchers,” said Marjorie A.
Tingle, director of the Shared
Instrumentation Grant Program at NIH’s National Center for Research
Resources, which awarded $1.3 million to PSC for Jonas.
“This new resource will enable them to study particularly
demanding data-intensive, memory-intensive and compute-intensive
problems that are currently beyond reach.”

“The memory structure of this system represents a significant advance for
scientific computing,” said PSC scientific directors Michael Levine and
Ralph Roskies in a joint statement. “It will make a difference in several
important areas, including quantum chemistry and genomics.”

PSC Connects to the TeraGrid

A LIGHT PIPELINE TIES THE EAST TO THE WEST OF NATIONAL CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE.

Funded by NSF, the TeraGrid
is a multi-year effort to deploy the world’s fastest, most
comprehensive distributed-computing infrastructure for open
scientific research. Analogous to an electrical power grid, the
TeraGrid will make computational power available to scientists and
engineers nationwide as a seamless resource, without regard to
physical location of computing systems.

Application Gateways
PSC network engineers have developed a unique and effective
approach to link the TeraGrid backplane and LeMieux. The
fiber-optic line — called a lambda — connects
directly to a router, supplied by Cisco Systems, in the PSC
machine room. From there, however, rather than configuring
all 750 of LeMieux’s AlphaServers with a direct
connection, a much smaller number of machines (from 20 to 30)
will bridge from the router to LeMieux. Called an
“Application Gateway,” this interface will run
software, developed by PSC, that transfers data between the
TeraGrid lambdas and LeMieux’s internal network.

Implemented
in February 2003, the TeraGrid’s Chicago-Los Angeles
backplane moves data at 40 gigabits per second — 600,000
times faster than typical Internet dial-up — the fastest
network in the world. It is referred to as a backplane — a
circuit board with plug-in slots for other devices — because
the TeraGrid is conceived of as a single national machine for
science and engineering research, with powerful systems in
different places that plug-in to the backplane. The initial
Pittsburgh to Chicago link of 10 gigabits per second, will triple
to 30 Gbps within the next year.

LeMieux, different in both processor and operating system than existing
TeraGrid systems, poses the challenge of “interoperability” —
to create a grid environment integrating heterogeneous systems. The TeraGrid
has established a PSC-led Interoperability Working Group to develop the
software needed to meet this challenge.

“Many of us in many places are working together to create the
TeraGrid,” said Rick Stevens of Argonne National Laboratory and the
University of Chicago, TeraGrid project director. “This work will empower
U.S. research in science and engineering for years to come. The Pittsburgh to
Chicago connection is a major step toward bringing this vision of integrated
national cyberinfrastructure into reality.”